Learn from foreign laws, urges liberal
LIBERAL leader Tian Jiyun yesterday made a bold call to legislators asking them to ''emancipate'' their minds and learn from foreign experience to accelerate legal reform in China.
Mr Tian, who is the Vice-Chairman of the National People's Congress (NPC), made the remark at a seminar on legal reform when he asked lawmakers to be daring in borrowing foreign experience to draft Chinese laws.
Speaking at the same meeting, the Secretary General of the NPC, Cao Zhi, predicted a heavy workload for legislators in their five-year term, saying they would have to examine as many as 152 new laws in that period.
These new laws were chosen from 199 proposals but Mr Cao did not say which laws had been screened out.
Twenty-five of the new laws are related to government administration and 13 are about the reform of the judicial system.
Top priority would be given to 54 laws over the establishment of a market system in China, according to Mr Cao.
While the official news agencies said the new legislation would cover areas such as bankruptcy, banking, publishing, penal institutions and elections, it was not clear whether the controversial press law was included.
According to a dispatch by the official China News Service, Mr Tian, who was formerly a vice-premier, told legislators that a bold spirit was in line with the instruction given by patriarch Deng Xiaoping in his 1992 tour of southern China.
''Deng Xiaoping has said that in order to achieve a winning edge over capitalism, socialism must be bold in absorbing and borrowing all fruits of human civilisation,'' Mr Tian said.
''The experience of [foreign] lawmaking is of course one of these fruits of human civilisation,'' he added.
The China News Service even quoted Mr Tian as saying it was ''unnecessary'' for China to develop a legal system totally on its own.
On the contrary, the Chinese legal system should match its foreign counterparts as China became increasingly linked to other countries.
Nevertheless, Mr Tian reminded legislators that they should not lose sight of domestic constraints in drafting the laws.
Chinese sources said ever since Mr Tian and NPC Chairman Qiao Shi were sidelined to the lawmaking body, both had repeatedly called for greater power for the NPC.
